"Balancing" Dissapointments

Well folks. You have shown amazing restraint this week while Gary was in the jungle ... with a 3% chance of being eaten by cannibals - and no way to communicate with him. Seriously a recipe for disaster for me - and did I hold up under the pressure?

Hell no!!!

Stayed up till all hours of the night, couldn't sleep, purchased hundreds of dollars worth of camera and photography shit (yeah!) and babbled to you INCESSANTLY on this blog. Not a stable molecule in my body. On the verge of going 'super nova' ...

... when he came home last night.

So really when I said I couldn't sleep in my last blog? It was a wee bit of a fib ... just a little. I knew Gary was in a plane and was headed home, and when he got home he would get on my blog in the first, oh, 20 minutes to see what sort of damage I had inflicted on friends and family since he was unable to monitor it in the jungle and reign me in ...

So I just watched like a good little stalker and when he got on ... called and we talked for an hour. Reset my 'crazy switch' something good ....



So - here's the thing. Question for ya. He WAS coming home on Friday - this coming Friday. Well, a couple of days ago something broke or blew up or was destroyed by the cannibals in PNG and he has to GO BACK TO THE JUNGLE tomorrow. Yeah - and won't be coming home until a few days later - so here's the question. Is my talk last night and some chatting today off and on going to reset me back to normal and I start this decline again from square one (OK, and when I say 'normal' I mean 'Lori normal' which isn't exactly in the normal range - just skew your chart ...)? I'm thinkin' .... NO.

I am nuts and probably won't be pulling out of it until I pull up to the airport and see his tired body make its way to my car. What can I say - I am hopeless ...

So ... today:

a) I've been napping (staple a gold star on my forehead ...) and

b) I've been frantically studying 'White Balance' to see if I can stay just a titch on this side of 'normal'

I don't think it is working out all that well ...

But - I took the damn photos (I will apparently have a potty mouth until the switch gets reset to 'Lori normal' ... although - come to think of it 'Lori normal' has a potty mouth - just normally doesn't blog with a potty mouth ...) you are going to have to put up with another camera lesson.

White Balance - means exactly what it sounds like. Your camera tries to make white look like white in any lighting situation - just like our eyes do by automatically adjusting. It uses that lovely Kelvin scale we learned about in science class with Candlelight being at the low, warm end with 2000K, Fluorescent bulbs being in the middle in that 'ever so unflattering to the skin' range with 4000K and Snow, water, shade being at the top or cool range at 8000K. So cameras these days have a light meter in them and just try their best to guess whether it is sunlight, shade, fluorescent light, Tungsten light (a regular light bulb) etc that is lighting up what you are trying to take a picture of. Who knew our cameras were so busy? So conflicted?

So - of course, I decide to see what each setting will do for my 'test photo shoot' setup. It is a freaking cloudy day (again ... damn I hate this weather and it is SO not helping my mental health ...), my camera settings are: ISO: 200, f-stop: 6.3 (so what did we learn last night folks? Yes - my background is going to be blurry ...) and my Shutter Speed: 1/4 second - because I SO KNOW YOU CARE!!!! My OCD just won't let me show these photos without letting you know now what I took it on - I will get over it ... eventually (it is, after all stored in my metadata and I can sort and filter it in Lightroom ....).

I was a bit surprised by the results - except that Auto White Balance was the best - telling me that maybe I shouldn't be dicking with this setting ... at all ...

Auto White Balance:

Daylight:
Shade:
Cloudy:
Tungsten:
Fluorescent:
But if you know me at all, and I really, really don't know if you do ... I would never post a photo on my web (that I care about, not like the ones above) that I have not 'Photoshopped':

And I'm liking the last one the best ....




I apologize now for the incessant blogging, the craziness to come or 'nuttiness' as Laura would put it ... and anything else you think I should be apologizing for ...









"Evah so sorry all...."